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Alcohol was available to adults throughout the entire period of national prohibition. It was manufacture, distribution and sales that were made illegal. Consumption at home? That was legal. Private clubs that had large supplies of alcohol? Also legal, though in some areas borderline legal. Public drunken-ness was generally already illegal in many places.At the most alcohol supplies dropped nationally by perhaps 40% at the peak of enforcement of prohibition, say in 1924–1925, while homicide rates increased 15–20%. At first the supply was kept up by international smuggling, of course, mostly from Mexico and Canada, but eventually large scale domestic illegal distilling took up most of the slack. So by the late 1920’s there was no real discernible alcohol shortage.Prohibition developed gradually, the movement spread in a wave through the country starting in the late nineteenth century, and by 1918 some 80% of counties already had some form of prohibition laws in effect. There was a great deal of optimism about the outcome of National Prohibition on the part of the advocates of dryness. It turned out to be completely unwarranted. What happened was that overly zealous enforcement in some areas led to higher crime rates nationwide, in order to meet the demand for alcohol on a region by region basis. Prohibition led especially to higher murder rates, to more violent crime. At the peak effect of enforcement efforts, before alternative illegal domestic suppliers built up their clandestine facilities, national alcohol supply dropped perhaps 40%, while murder rates increased some 15–20%.2 Prohibition: A Historical OverviewNation-wide alcohol Prohibition was written into the US Constitution as the 18th Amendment in January 1919, and repealed from it just fourteen years later, as the 21st Amendment, in December 1933. Given the constitutional supermajority requirements to amend the U.S. Constitution, such a policy reversal is striking1. Alcohol Prohibition, though, was not a sudden appearance; it was the endpoint of a prohibitionist wave with origins dating as far back as the 1870s, during the so-called Temperance Crusade, which would later give rise to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).Prohibition was introduced staggeredly across counties and states through a gradualist political strategy of religiously motivated temperance groups, closely related to the Baptist, Methodist and Evangelical churches, and composed mostly of native-born whites and women (Sinclair (n.d.); Okrent (2010)). The two most prominent were the WCTU, and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL). Both developed a nationwide organizational structure, but the ASL took the lead in the beginning of the Twentieth century. Initially these groups did not constitute a majority. Their political success was due to their pivotal character in the competitive context of bipartisan politics, based on strong local campaigning and national lobbying, and on the intensive use of referenda initiatives. Republicans and Democrats were frequently so evenly divided that a switch of the temperance vote could decide local elections. Prohibitionist groups were able to become pivotal even in the within party races of the Democratic-dominated South. 2Key to the political success of the drys was their lack partisan aligniment. There was disagreement on the issue within Southern Democrats too, as a faction of the party believed that allowing the Federal government to make decisions regarding Prohibition could be a step to further undermine Southern autonomy (Szymansky (2003)). An indicator of the lack of partisan alignment on Prohibition is the House roll call on the 18th Amendment; 64 Democrats and 62 Republicans voted against, while 140 Democrats and 138 Republicans did so for Prohibition. A second element to explain the dry success was its gradual approach. Local option measures were followed by state-wide legislation. Right before the 18th Amendment was adopted, almost 80% of U.S. counties were already under some form of Prohibition. Figure 1 shows the dates of state-adoption of Prohibition legislation. It shows how the Prohibitionist wave moved across the United States during the 1910s, up until the introduction of nationwide Prohibition with the 18th Amendment 3.1Constitutional amendments require approval by two thirds of the vote in both the House and the Senate, and a plurality of the vote in either both chambers of at least three fourths of the State Legislatures, or in at least three fourths of State Constitutional Conventions.2A good example of how competition for the dry vote in the South did increase the competitiveness of local politics was the 1910 Tennessee gubernatorial election. The unwillingness of the incumbent Democratic governor Patterson to enforce the 1909 State Constitutional Amendment introducing Prohibition (after vetoing the Amendment and having his veto overridden by the legislature) alienated a dry fraction of the Democratic party, even after he stepped down for reelection. After more than 30 years in which the Republican party had not occupied Tennessee’s gubernatorial office, Republican candidate Ben Hooper won the election on a prohibitionist platform (See Isaac (1965) for a historically detailed account of Prohibition politics in Tennessee).Figure 1: Timing of State Adoption of ProhibitionYear State Prohibition Adopted1905 OK NC GA MS TN1910 WV WA SC VA ID OR IA NE CO AR MT AZ AL MI1915 UT NM NH IN DC WI VT SD RI PA NY NJ MO MN MD MA WY LA TX IL OH DE NV CT FL KY CABefore Constitutonal Prohibition, enforcement of alcohol laws in states under Prohibition was usually mild. In dry communities it was redundant, while in wet communities it was relatively ignored. Most alcohol consumption took place in saloons and other public spaces, which made public intoxi- cation a widespread phenomenon (Blocker (2006); Stayton (1923)). Prohibitionist associations were concerned about the social consequences of saloons, and arrests for drunkenness were seen as a key indicator of successful enforcement of dry laws. But loopholes were abundant and often overlooked (Franklin (1971)).Although the passage of the 18th Amendment and its enforcement law (the Volstead Act)4 appeared as highly restrictive by banning any liquor with more than 0.5% alcoholic content, Congress did not make large appropriations for its federal enforcement. In fact, the Amendment established concomitant enforcement by the local, state and federal levels. Congress, expecting local and state cooperation and general compliance with the law, created a modest federal enforcement organization (Kyvig (1979, p. 23)). The weakness of federal enforcement is best exemplified by the constant changes in Prohibition administration during the 1920s 5.3In figure 3, Kansas, Maine and North Dakota are not shown because these three states were already under Prohibition since the late 19th century. Kansas adopted Prohibition in 1880, Maine in 1884, and North Dakota in 1889 (at the same time it acquired statehood). Kansas and Maine had already been under Statewide Prohibition in the mid-1800s during the first Prohibitionist wave.4President Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, and his veto was overridden by Congress.5Originally, the Volstead Act created the Prohibition Unit as a department of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, with Prohibition Directors in each state. The Coolidge administration avoided dealing with the Prohibition problem throughout, and in 1925, there was a sharp reduction in the size of the Prohibition Unit (Colvin (1926, p. 495)). The critical situation regarding corruption and venality within it resulted in a reform of Federal Prohibition administration under the Prohibition Reorganization Act of 1927. This act created the Bureau of Prohibition, ascribed to the Treasury Department, putting its employees under the Civil Service and creating 27 Prohibition Districts (Schmeckebier (1929)).Data on Federal enforcement outcomes during the 1920s shows similar trends across the four main U.S. regions. Enforcement intensity peaked around 1928. Early during national Prohibition, given the initial absence of domestic producers, most of the supply of illegal liquor came from international smuggling (Okrent (2010)). Over time, local production based on illegal distilleries and stills caught- up with demand. Nevertheless, the number of distillers and fermenters seized fell sharply in the later Prohibition years, suggesting a sharp fall in the enforcement activities against producers. Indeed, by 1928 several states had already repealed their own enforcement legislation. The most prominent case was that of New York, which in 1923, repealed the state enforcement law. Alfred Smith, the Democratic Presidential candidate in the 1928 election, was then the Governor of New York. In his own words, “Some seem to think that my approval [of the repeal] will mean the preservation of American Institutions. Many others impeled by equally patriotic motives seem to feel that my approval will be destructive of American government. Obviously, both cannot be right...” (Smith (1923, p. 601)).To have an idea of the limited extent of law enforcement at the federal level, in 1929-1930, total liquor seizures in the U.S., including spirits, malts, wines, cider, mash, and pomace, were approximately 74 million gallons (U.S. Bureauof Prohibition (Several Years), and Wickersham-Commission (1928- 1931)). Compared to the 3, 375 million gallons of booze which, according to Okrent (2010, p. 202), were produced and distributed annually by Max Hoff, an illegal producer in Pennsylvania, federal enforcement looks insignificant.Most law enforcement relied on local efforts, not only because of the inherent difficulties in enforcing alcohol restrictions throughout the country, which limited the federal law enforcement stategies to infrequent raids and a focus on some particularly troublesome areas, but also because of the inefficiency of the federal agency. Complaining about this issue in 1926, Colvin (1926, p. 497) argued that, “Although the United States had adopted a national standard throughout the nation, the administration of the law so perverted this objective as to make enforcement substantially a matter of local opinion because it was administered to so large a degree by men owing their appointment to local political influences and subject to local political pressures... it was the worst form of local option -the option of the local politicians to determine the extent to which the law should be enforced-, politicians, many of whom were personally wet, others of whom wanted to placate a wet element in their constituencies, and all of whom belonged to political parties which sought wet votes as well as dry ones”. While drys saw the problem in the ineptitude and corruption of enforcers, wet would argue that “If moral force... does not make them stop, physical force must be used. Where is the physical force to come from? Plainly, in a nation of 120 million people, scattered over an area of 3 millon square miles, the force must be predominantly supplied by the local enforcement authorities... but the police, the courts and the juries are the servants and reflectors of local sentiment”(Tydings (1930, p. 125)).The extent of Prohibition enforcement was responsive to the local demand for both Prohibition and alcohol, and elected authorities were agents of both groups. This seems to have been true not only during Constitutional Prohibition, but also during state-level Prohibition. Franklin (1971),https://leitner.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/resources/papers/Garcia-Jimeno_2012.pdfSo, the 18th Amendment was, in the end, recognized to be an utterly ineffective measure and it was abandoned. Since then the US policy towards “drugs” has become even less rational. I would not be surprised to see more Constitutional Amendments proposed banning all “drugs” except by prescription, and strictly limiting prescription drugs that are now being said, with very little empirical support, to be the sole cause of a massive nationwide epidemic of overdoses.Prohibition was utter hypocrisy and an abject failure. I’ll just re-quote Al Smith, of the Tammany Hall machine, who repealed the enforcement laws for alcohol in NY in 1923, because what he had to say on the occasion is trenchant.Indeed, by 1928 several states had already repealed their own enforcement legislation. The most prominent case was that of New York, which in 1923, repealed the state enforcement law. Alfred Smith, the Democratic Presidential candidate in the 1928 election, was then the Governor of New York. In his own words, “Some seem to think that my approval [of the repeal] will mean the preservation of American Institutions. Many others impeled by equally patriotic motives seem to feel that my approval will be destructive of American government. Obviously, both cannot be right...” (Smith (1923, p. 601)).

According to Wikipedia ([1]) the US has 284 police officers per 100,000 people, so let’s assume you have almost 900,000 officers at your disposal. How do you police the entire United States.You’re going to find out that crime is not uniformly distributed. With such a bird’s-eye POV, you are going to throw as many resources as you can at the high-crime areas. Imagine an upper middle class neighborhoods where the most serious crimes are some high school kid smoking a joint or a car thief from the other side stealing a parked car in the night. Maybe the occasional B&E. That neighborhood is never going to see a patrol car. Not when the inner city kids are stabbing and shooting each other a few miles away.The people of said affluent neighborhood are not going to like this. It’s like nobody cares about their issues. The inner city kids, OTOH are going to feel harassed.Central planning is occasionally more efficient because of economies of scale. But there is no getting around the issue that the interests of the nation as a whole (assuming that this centralized police force represents those) are not aligned with the interests of every state, county and town.Allocating a whole bunch of detectives to police financial crime on Wall Street may be good for New York, but spending all that necessarily reduces the resources for fighting gangs in Los Angeles and Miami. Having the police be local introduces inefficiencies, but it also addresses local concerns at the local level.Long story short, there is no way that a central planner will not do the rational thing which is to concentrate a disproportionate part of the resources on big cities. This will inevitably make smaller towns more vulnerable to crime.[1] List of countries and dependencies by number of police officers - Wikipedia

As most of the other answers have noted, the United States and Canada have never fought a war with each other. Rather, they have, first, a colonial history of being on the front line in wars between Britain and France, and second, Canada as a colony of the British Empire in both of its wars with the United States.For historical clarity we should stipulate that the United States didn’t officially exist until July 4, 1776, and wasn’t recognized by the British crown, which then ruled what is now Canada, until 1783. Further, Canada didn’t exist as a nation until 1867, so the Maritime Provinces, Newfoundland, the Prairie Provinces, and British Columbia have no great part in any question about invasions. Practically speaking, Canadians who like to be quarrelsome on the topic of Americans invading Canada always track the cultural narratives of Canada and the United States back before either nation existed, when both were founded as colonies by Europeans.So, reaching back in time . . .During the colonial period, the frontier between French Canada, meaning the St. Lawrence River valley and the Lake Ontario-Laker Erie corridor, and the Thirteen Colonies that eventually made up the United States, was a violent and bloody one.The French settled the Saint Lawrence River valley from the Atlantic beginning in 1607, at the same time as the English were making their first temperate Atlantic colony at Jamestown, in Virginia. Because the Appalachian Mountains and Acadia/Nova Scotia lay between the two direct sea routes to North America, these European colonies had little to do with each other for the first eighty years of their existence.The first conflict between the French colony and the peoples to the south was created by Samuel Champlain, the founder of French Canada, who joined a native war party in 1609 and helped them win a battle with the Iroquois of what is now New York State. This quarrel with the Iroquois persisted all through the history of French Canada.Beginning in 1688, Britain and France fought a series of wars in Europe that inevitably involved their North American colonies. The French, who had closer dealings with Native American tribes then the British, used them to raid across the Appalachians into New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. These invasions and raids were often organized by French priests in Canada and were often led by French officers stationed in Canada. Raiding parties regularly included Canadian militia, many of whom were expert woodsmen and as willing to loot, rape, murder, and take slaves and scalps as their native allies.There were four of these wars, officially, along with two smaller conflicts (Dummers War 1722–1725 and Father Le Loutre’s War (1749–1755) triggered by the constant tension along the Appalachian frontier.Note, that, because of these conflicts, there was never a time in the seventy-five years between 1688 and 1763 when the colonies that were to become the United States were not under threat of Canadian invasion.Most of the tribes on the British side of the Appalachian wilderness got along peacefully with the British colonists. When they responded to colonial racism and corrupt land deals, they might rise up against one or more colonies, but they were hopelessly outnumbered within a generation of the first European landings and these conflicts seldom lasted more then a few weeks or months. In spite of this, Colonial America developed a dark mythos of “savages” raiding their farms and villages from out of the forests, torturing, mutilating, and murdering those caught unawares, and carrying off captives to be enslaved or returned for later ransom. All in the colonies outside of the major towns knew of these raids or experienced them, and almost all of them originated in French Canada. As an example, of the half-dozen hysterical young women who triggered the Salem Witch Trials, one had been carried off in a raid and endured months of terror and hardship before being returned to Salem. Another had witnessed, as a child, her entire family being hacked to death by Canadian raiders.Because of this history, the British-American colonists of 1763 were among the greatest patriots and loyalists for the British crown in all of the new British empire. The conquest of French Canada had, which included contingents from the British colonies removed a threat that had terrorized them for generations.A political quarrel between the governments of King George III and the British Atlantic coastal colonies quickly soured those patriotic settlements. Open revolt against the crown erupted in 1775. The “Continental Congress” created to govern the rebellious colonies realized that British North America, as the newly conquered French colonial territories were called, could still be a source of raiding parties and invading armies. They organized an invasion of their own to capture Montreal and Quebec, the only two substantial towns along the Saint Lawrence River. There was hope that the French-Canadians, who had hated the British before being conquered by them, might join the rebellious southern colonies.In the end, poor planning, limited supplies, smallpox, pneumonia, and malaria all combined to make the Continental Congress’s incursion into Canada a military disaster. Montreal was in Continental hands for six months, but Governor Guy Carleton organized a skillful defense of Quebec and held the city until a relief force under General John Burgoyne arrived in the spring of 1776.1776 was the year the Continental army became an army of the United States of America, but it was also a year marked by a succession of military disasters. A British fleet delivered an army under General William Howe to Long Island, where he defeated General George Washington repeatedly and captured New York City. Carleton and Burgoyne took Montreal and drove American forces south along the Lake Champlain corridor that Canadian colonials, natives, and Europeans had been using for invasions and raids since the founding of Quebec. The best of the American leaders, General Benedict Arnold, organized a naval squadron on Lake Champlain and forced Carleton to build his own squadron to secure the lake for an invasion of New York. Carleton’s ships annihilated Arnold’s at the Battle of Valcour Island in October . . .. . . but Arnold won the campaign: it was too late in the season for this invasion of the United States from Canada to press south.Meanwhile, to the astonishment, horror, and outrage of Americans, Carleton took up the old French strategy of sending Native Americans south from Canada to raid American farms and villages from Maine to Virginia. The Iroquois Confederation, staunch defenders of the New York frontier since before the arrival of the Europeans, split into pro-colonial and pro-British factions. Four of the six nations sided with the crown. They joined Canadians in their savage war of raiding for loot, scalps, and hostages, while burning fields, farms, and villages in New York and Pennsylvania.Farther west, the British ministers had, in 1774, extended the borders of the Canadian province of Quebec extended west to the Mississippi River and to the North bank of the Ohio River.This brought Canadian officials into the Great Lakes region and put them in charge of the Native American tribes north of the Ohio. The territory south of the Ohio, meanwhile, was being settled by Virginians. These settlements, which came to be collectively known as “Kentucky,” were under constant threat of attack from the Great Lakes tribes, who, in turn, were under constant threat of invasion by squatters and hunters from Kentucky. Their conflict would be the longest and bloodiest of the “Indian Wars” of the United States, save for those with western predatory tribes like the Comanche and Apache, and would drag on for fifty years.George Washington’s counterattack against Howe’s garrisons in New Jersey in December of 1776 undid all the victories the British had won in the Thirteen Colonies other than the capture of New York City. British armies could not draw on local food and fodder and had to be supported entirely by ships sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. King George saw his his military budget hemorrhaging money and the French, Dutch, and Spanish making plans to support the colonial rebellion in North America.The British ministry ordered Howe to conduct an active campaign in 1777 and Burgoyne to mount another invasion of the United States from Canada. Howe’s campaign was directed at Philadelphia, which he captured handily. Burgoyne took his army directly down the Lake Champlain invasion route. Meanwhile, a second, smaller army, consisting of British troops, German Mercenaries, a Loyalist regiment, Canadian militia, and Iroquois and Canadian Native Americans, sailed from Montreal to Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario. This force, under Colonel Barry St. Leger, planned to ravage the Anglo-American and Dutch settlements of the Mohawk valley in New York State and move on from there to join Burgoyne at Albany.The defense of New York against this Anglo-Canadian invasion became an American epic.Colonel Peter Ganesvoort held the remote Fort Stanwix against St. Leger. The siege of that fort lasted most of August. Meanwhile, New York militia and a company of Oneida Iroquois warriors marched to Ganesvoort’s relief and were ambushed by St. Leger’s forces at Oriskany. The resulting battle in the forest was prolonged and utterly brutal. General Nicholas Herkimer, wounded in the leg and thrown from his horse in the opening fires, led his men sitting against a tree and smoking a pipe.Brutal fighting with muskets, swords, knives, and tomahawks raged from mid-morning into the afternoon. The Iroquois on the British side killed so many Americans that a stream in the forest ran with blood. The Americans and Oneida were defending their homes and families. They refused to break or give ground. When Ganesvoort raided the Anglo-Canadian camp, the exhausted Iroquois left the battlefield and the British had to follow. Half of the eight-hundred militia and Oneida who’d marched out that morning under Herkimer lay shot or hacked to death among the trees, but the survivors held the field. They carried their their wounded leader home without hindrance from St. Leger’s exhausted forces. He was forced to retreat back to Canada.Burgoyne’s invading army had meanwhile gotten bogged down in the mountainous forests south of Lake Champlain. A foraging expedition into Vermont was surrounded and eliminated at Bennington by swarms of militia from three American states. Benedict Arnold, after seeing off St. Leger’s detachment from Fort Stanwix in late August, returned to join the fighting around Burgoyne’s camp at Saratoga, New York, in September. Trapped by American forces and unable to feed his army any longer, Burgoyne surrendered on October 17th, 1777 to American General Horatio Gates.This decisive victory ended the threat of British invasions from Canada for the rest of the war, particularly since it led directly to the King of France recognizing American independence and declaring war on Great Britain. This forced the British to consolidate their ground forces in North America around New York and keep only a defensive garrison in Canada.The Americans, for their part, lacked the strength to threaten the Canadian heartland along the St. Lawrence River. However, there were two more important events occurring on the American-Canadian frontier.Guy Carleton’s second as governor of Canada was Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton, who was also in charge of Indian Affairs. He administrated the western part of the Province of Quebec from Fort Detroit, between Lake Erie and Lake Huron. Hamilton stayed out of the disputes between the rebellious colonies and the Natives for the first two years of the war. In 1777, on instructions from Carleton, he openly encouraged Native American raids into Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. He soon became infamous in American frontier settlements as “Hair Buyer Hamilton” because of his policy of paying Native warriors for scalps.In the summer of 1778, Colonel George Rogers Clark of Virginia led a militia force to the “Illinois country” just north of the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio, seeking to strike a military blow against the British and deter the continuing Indian raids. He captured several towns whose inhabitants, mainly French immigrants, were not interested in a distant war. However, Lieutenant Governor Hamilton, in December, led an expedition out of Fort Detroit westward and captured a fort at Vincennes, Illinois. Clark organized a small force of Virginians for a counterattack. They traversed a hundred miles of wintry terrain in February of 1779, wading flooded rivers choked with ice and snow. They recaptured Vincennes and also captured Hamilton, who was expecting to renew his campaign in the spring.British prestige among Native Americans never recovered from this defeat. The small victory at Vincennes guaranteed that the United States would control the “Northwest Territory” between the Ohio and the Great Lakes for the rest of the war. It could be said that seldom in the history of war has such a trivial military campaign wrought such important effect on world history. At the Peace of Paris in 1783, this vast region, half of the Province of Quebec, was ceded to the new United States. The wealth of what Americans called “the Northwest Territory,” and the vital center of the North American continent, would thenceforth be controlled by the American republic and not the British Empire. In less then a century the United States would be the second most productive economy on earth, but it would not be controlled by any European power. Canada would be stolid, but minor, element in the British Empire, but never a major power in its own right.An additional tragedy resolved itself in 1779 in the mountainous interior of New York and Pennsylvania. For all the the long decades of the French and Indian Wars, the British Atlantic colonies lacked the resources to strike back north against Native Americans who were raiding their farms, burning their fields, and destroying their settlements. In this new war, the Mohawk, Onandaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes of the Iroquois confederations joined Canadian and Loyalist warriors and militia in ravaging white settlements all along the frontier and into the Hudson and Susquehanna valleys, killing hundreds of militia and civilians.The Iroquois, however, were not too far removed from American military depots to be safe from retaliation. In 1779, General John Sullivan, acting under orders from George Washington, organized a small army in Pennsylvania and marched directly into the Iroquois homeland.Over the course of three months, Sullivan’s army marched into the Iroquois homeland, raiding farms, burning fields, and destroying settlements. The loyalist Iroquois had to retreat to Canada for sustenance. Iroquois political power along the frontier was broken forever.The Peace of Paris in 1783 should, in theory, have ended the Canadian threat to the United States. The Native American tribes east of Lake Huron were worn down by disease and European vices, alcoholism being the most important. They ceased to be a factor in the politics of British North America. The British government in London was even able to create a province of Upper Canada, corresponding to what is now southern Ontario, for Loyalists exiled from the United States after the Revolution. Upper Canada was created entirely from lands once held by Native American tribes now devastated from contact with white civilization. They were were quickly reduced to surviving in a few small “reserves” on the fringes of white society. Something similar was happening in the former Iroquois lands of New York State. The frontier between New York and Canada grew peaceful, with whites on both sides of the border passing back and forth freely.In London, the British government was not convinced that the new American nation would endure. It took a decade for the Americans to persuade the British to evacuate the forts on the American side of their border with Upper Canada. Officials stationed in outposts in Upper Canada constantly conspired with Native American tribes to destabilize American governance in the “Northwest Territory,” which included what are now the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. One governor of Upper Canada, John Horne Simcoe, was an actual loyalist, despised the United States, and hoped that he could use the Northwest tribes to return to British rule the territories conquered by George Rogers Clark in 1778.The Americans, for their part, wanted to settle the Northwest, which had only fifty thousand Native American inhabitants living in a country half the size of France or Germany and with potential farmland and resources as great as any country in Europe.American ambitions were handicapped at first by leaders so suspicious of the military that they declined to pay for a real army or navy. That changed after a terrible battle along the Wabash River in 1791 that saw some seven hundred Americans killed by warriors of the Shawnee and Miami peoples, the worst American military defeat in the first century and a half of the nation’s history. General Anthony Wayne, who’d learned the military trade under George Washington during the Revolution, created a new American army on the banks of the Ohio River, taking three years to do so. Meanwhile, the tribal coalition leaders attempted to convince their British patrons in Upper Canada to give them cannon along with their usual gifts of muskets and powder. In the end, the British were unwilling to commit to a overt war between the United States and British Canada. Wayne. They did, however, march deep into American territory and build a new outpost, Fort Miamis, near what is now Toledo. In 1794, Wayne marched across Indian territory with his new army, forcing the Tribal alliance to fight a battle virtually in sight of the new fort.[War leader] Blue Jacket placed the confederation’s core—Shawnee, Delaware, and Miami—in the center. The right was formed by a few British regulars dressed as Indians; loyalist militiamen from Detroit; Wyandot; and the few Six Nations Iroquois who had agreed to fight. On the left were Potawatomie, Ottawa, and Ojibwa.After routing this polyglot army, Wayne scored his more important victory. He marched up to Fort Miamis and reminded the British, commanded by Major William Campbell, that his post was in American territory.Wayne had already determined that he couldn’t take Fort Miamis. He was low on food, and his howitzers weren’t big enough. There was a more important strategic objective anyway: make the Indians overwhelmingly aware, if they weren’t already, that there was no help for them in the British army. To bring that point home, the next day he made two moves. First, under the eye of an infuriated Campbell, Wayne posted four companies of light infantry and four of dragoons in a perimeter at the edge of the woods about a hundred yards from the walls, completely surrounding the fort. In response, Campbell put the garrison at its posts and trained cannon on the American men. Then Wayne applied the coup de grâce. Leaving the woods, the general himself rode out, alone, onto the open ground around the fort. British soldiers stared in amazement. Wayne was within easy pistol shot. He rode slowly around the entire fort, inspecting it with ostentatious minuteness. Within the fort, one officer begged Campbell for permission to dispatch the American bravo, but despite his own outrage Campbell refused. He could defend the fort, but he couldn’t fire the first shot in a war with the United States. He was forced to observe the American commander inspect his post at will. Finally, Wayne withdrew, and the two commanders exchanged escalating notes accusing each other of aggression. Wayne ordered Campbell to withdraw to Fort Detroit, offering him safe passage. Campbell said if Wayne didn’t desist, honor would force him to fire. But Wayne’s real work here was almost done.Hogeland, William. Autumn of the Black Snake. Farrar, Straus and GirouxAfter burning all Native, Canadian, and British property near Fort Miamis, Wayne withdrew. The British soon abandoned the fort and soon turned Fort Detroit and the other outposts on American territory over to the new American army.The situation in the American Northwest and Southwest remained relatively stable for a decade. However, in the wake of the renewed conflict between Great Britain and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France, both European powers began bullying the United States to prevent it from trading with their enemy. The new American president, Thomas Jefferson, wanted no part of the conflict in Europe, but did want American sovereignty to be respected and its trade and trading vessels to be safe and free from interference. He also abhorred war and allowed the American army to be reduced to a paltry force barely able to garrison a few frontier outposts. The American navy he might have put ashore entirely, but pro-trade factions in congress would not allow American civilian ships to be completely unprotected on the oceans of the world.Jefferson attempted to resist British and French abuses with trade sanctions, but the British, who controlled the sea lanes of the Atlantic, mostly ignored him. A lot of the British leaders disliked Americans personally, they were not about to compromise with anyone in the war against Napoleon, and they were certainly not inclined to treat seriously with a nation with so little military power and so laughable an army and navy.With much of the British establishment convinced that the feeble American republic would sooner or later collapse into factions and dissolve into smaller states, the British officials in what was now Upper Canada saw opportunity for gaining territory, wealth, and fame by undermining American rule in the Northwest and possibly regaining control of the Great Lakes for British North America. They began actively courting relationships with tribes from around Fort Detroit south to the Ohio and beyond, even making inquiries among the Creek Indians of what is now Mississippi and Alabama.Tecumseh, a brilliant Shawnee leader from the Ohio country, started in 1808 a movement to created a larger Tribal Coalition then had ever existed before. He carefully kept the British at arms length for a few years, accepting some provisions and goods, but working mainly on political alliances between the tribes. In 1811, President James Madison in Washington was discovering that American boycotts and trade restrictions on British goods were having no effect. Meanwhile, Tecumseh’s younger brother, Tenskwatawa, foolishly accepted British deliveries of muskets and powder while his brother was negotiating with the Red Stick faction of the Creek Nation far to the south. In November, William Henry Harrison, the territorial governor of Indiana, marched north to challenge Tenskwatawa. At Tippecanoe, an encampment some hundred miles west of the old Fallen Timbers battlefield, Harrison defeated Tenskwatawa and scattered his followers. Tecumseh hurried north to regroup his forces while Harrison sent his militia home for the winter. Six months later, word came that the United States had finally declared war on Great Britain.While many in the American congress considered that the United States would have no chance of defeating Britain or even doing Great Britain any serious harm, President Monroe felt he had no other option. It was either fight or allow the United States to be treated as a lesser nation for the foreseeable future. A small clique of “Warhawks” in the congress thought that Canada would be an easy conquest. Others were not so sure, but, literally, Canada was the only British possession within reach for a country whose navy was outnumbered by their opponents by roughly a hundred to one in guns and ships. Possibly, with most of the British army occupied in Spain, seizing part of Canada might force the British government to take the United States seriously and gain them full diplomatic rights with the British and the rest of Europe.Unknown to Madison, Lord Liverpool, the British Prime Minister, was already trying to move his government in the direction of respect and compromise with the United States. With war already declared, however, he had to fight it out, at least for the time being.While the British didn’t send much in the way of reinforcements to lower Canada, which bordered New York state east of Lake Ontario, the Americans had done nothing to prepare for war and their attempts to invade Lower Canada from 1812 to 1814 failed miserably. So, also, did attempts at invading Upper Canada along the Niagara River frontier between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.Along the old Fort Detroit frontier, Tecumseh began the war well organized and ready to invade the United States along with his British allies. In 1812, they captured Detroit and most of the other American outposts between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. In 1813, raids along the frontier continued for the first part of the year. However, the British were still not sending Tecumseh any serious aid and the Americans were reorganizing under William Henry Harrison, now a general in the American army, and Oliver Hazard Perry, a young naval officer creating a squadron of warships to fight for control of Lake Erie. By September Harrison was marching north. Perry engaged a British naval squadron at Put-in-Bay and destroyed it. The British commander in western Canada abandoned Detroit and Tecumseh’s Indian forces had to retreat with him. Harrison pursued and invaded Canadian territory in earnest. At the Battle of the Thames, the British regiments broke and fled the battlefield; Tecumseh went down fighting. Harrison, with no interest in Canadian territory per se, withdrew his main army to Detroit and began making peace with the tribes. The southwest part of what is now Ontario remained in American hands for the rest of the war.Napoleon was being defeated by late in 1813 and would abdicate in April of 1814. Powerful factions in Great Britain decided it was time to punish the Americans for their effrontery in started a war with the greatest naval power on Earth. Twenty thousand regulars from the British armies in France and Spain were loaded onto transports and shipped across the Atlantic. The Royal Navy, while it had failed to take the fighting on the North American lakes seriously enough, had responded efficiently to the American navy, which had captured three British frigates in the Atlantic. By the end of 1813, it had bottled the smaller navy up in its ports. There was therefore a variety of targets for conquest on American territory.Local forces in Nova Scotia, not then a formal part of Canada, had already successfully invaded the future state of Maine. The British commander leading those troops forced Americans to swear oaths of loyalty to the crown and named his conquest “New Ireland.” Farther south, a British expedition raided along the Chesapeake, marched inland and burned Washington, then failed to take Baltimore, a far more important strategic target. Seeking easier game and calmer seas, it sailed south to an eventual dramatic battle at New Orleans.The majority of the British regulars, however, were sent to Canada. They outnumbered the American regulars on that frontier by about five to one. However, their commander, General George Provost, was a timid sort who failed to send any force west to challenge Harrison. He even failed to assail the Americans along the Niagara, who had managed to burn the Canadian town of York over the winter. Instead, late in the season, he invaded New York state along the old Lake Champlain corridor. A makeshift American army prepared to meet him at the town of Plattsburgh. However, like Carleton and Burgoyne some thirty-seven years earlier, Prevost needed to control the lake to supply his troops. As his regulars were aligning themselves to crush the mostly militia army along the Saranac River, Prevost’s naval squadron sailed out to engage and drive off an American squadron under Captain Thomas Macdonough.MacDonough’s cool and efficient leadership so completely dominated the British that their squadron—and any chance of a successful British-Canadian invasion of the United States—was annihilated. Prevost, who could still have inflicted a major defeat of the American army deployed within musket range of his own forces, instead called off the campaign and retreated to Canada.Plattsburgh and the British defeat at Baltimore were the deciding factor in the British decision to end the war without punishing the Americans or even declaring a victory. A peace treaty was signed within weeks of word getting back to London.The great losers in the century and a half of wars, raids, and invasions along the Canadian-American frontier was, of course, the Native American tribes. On both sides of the border, disease, cultural attrition, assimilation, and the tsunami of European immigration overwhelmed their communities. While Canadians and Americans have lived at peace with each other for two hundred years, the tribes have been obliged to settle in small reserves and reservations, some still in the region of the border, others far to the north or west, some as far a way as Oklahoma and Mexico. Most of those that fought in the wars still exist. They no longer serve as tools and weapons at the whim of alien governments. By and large, like the European-Americans, French Canadians, and Anglo-Canadians, they get by peacefully and make their way in the world, as it is now, in their own time.